Author Archives: Kerch McConlogue

Video games and the consequences of failure

It is with deep incredulity that my family talks about my college independent study in game theory. It was way cool, but pretty out of character given my deep dislike of games in general.

Donkey Kong I am also terrible at video games. Maybe it’s an eye hand coordination problem but I couldn’t even make the Donkey Kong jump in the right places. I could, however, play Dr. Mario with complete disregard for everything else going on around me. Heck, I could even play that in my sleep. I’d watch those pills keep dropping for hours. (It is true: You shouldn’t play video games, even solitaire, right before bed. Keeps your brain fired up when it should be slowing down. Read a boring magazine instead!)

However, I am so tired of people, parents mostly, complaining that video games killed play time or that video games made a kid commit unspeakable violence. If your kids can’t tell the difference between video games and reality, then you have a much bigger problem than thinking the games are making him do it.

But I digress.

I was tickled to find that librarians are being encouraged to play video games or at least to acknowledge that people who do play video games view the help desk differently. InsideHigherEd.com is an online source for news, opinion and jobs for all of higher education. The June 25 article reported on the annual meeting of the American Library Association.

Ever watch a little kid with a new video game? Notice him furiously reading the directions first? Na.. didn’t think so.

“With video games, ‘you can play while you are inept,’” said James Paul Gee, the author of Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul , You can poke around in a video game. Try the same things in different orders and get different results (Or, so I’ve heard). Gee also said there are “lowered consequences of failure.”

I remember my engineer husband’s frustration when my geek son first started tinkering with the insides of computers. “HE DIDN’T READ THE INSTRUCTIONS! He doesn’t understand circuit theory.”

Says the kid, “Don’t worry, Dad. They’re designed to only go in one way!”

On demand learning is a very powerful thing.

Maybe it really doesn’t matter if you know all the rules before you jump in. In fact, what if waiting until you have all the information just keeps you from getting started.

So start now; or start over. Click AA,BB, jump, jump in a different place, see what happens.

If there is no blood, you can always change your mind.

Five second rule rules!

When I was growing up if food hit the ground, my mother just said, “You can eat that.”

When I was in college, back in the 70s, my engineer not-quiet-yet-husband first told me there was an actual rule about eating food that fell on the floor. He told me food was safe to be picked up from the floor and eaten a full SIX seconds after it fell!
eating off the ground

I know other people who actually believe that food is safe up to a whole TEN seconds after it falls!

And now today I have learned that the five-second rule has, in fact, been scientifically proven. I read it first in Kevin Cowherd’s column in the Baltimore Sun today. I checked it out on The Connecticut College website where they reported that two smart women, Molly Goettsche and Nicole Moin, both cellular and molecular biology majors, took it upon themselves to prove the rule using apples (who would eat them after they fall on the floor), Skittles (which everyone knows actually DO last for ever) and agar plates (that’s real science!)

The results prove, Goettsche and Moin said, that you can wait at least 30 seconds to pick up wet foods and more than a minute to pick up dry foods before they become contaminated with bacteria.

They’ll be great mothers one day, I feel certain.

Whoever says that engineers and geeks don’t have a sense of humor is just nuts!

What do you want?

Richard Reardon over at his R&R Business Development Blog started talking about the difference between “wanting change” and “wanting to change.” That’s an interesting distinction.

He suggests that looking at what you have now is the place to look for clues to what you need.

I’m thinking that what I have now is not much help in deciding what to change. I have stuff and I have plans and that’s precisely what keeps me stuck where I am. Perhaps if YOU look at my stuff, YOU might get a clue about what I need. But it’s not your life.

But if I think I want to move to a new house that would indicate a specific change and a plan of action to be developed — lots of stuff has to go away from this house and lots of little things need to get fixed on a more immediate time table.

But if I didn’t know that moving was the change I had in mind, then no amount of looking at my stuff would give me the impetus to rent a dumpster.

So I’m thinking a different first clue is to ask what is it that you don’t want? Then look at the opposite of that and see if that is what you DO want — or if maybe it points at least in the right direction.

Personally, I need pencil and paper to figure out the opposites and that gives me a nice list in the end. And I love lists.

Powerpoint: Does it really suck out your brains? Or does it just suck?

For so long I have hated Power Point presentations.
So many speakers making stupid stuff jump and fade and zip… just because they can. Too much attention to the process and not enough to the product. Reminds me of when I built my first website and my hobbiest webguy wanted things to blink… Just because he knew how to do it!

YUK!

Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, AU) reports on a study done at the University of NSW.. oooo, science. In part the paper says:

… the research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

They also make a point for presenting students with problems including the answers — instead of asking students to figure them out for themselves. I’m not sure how I feel about that so I won’t comment on that for now. But I digress.

I originally caught up with the story at The Register (whose tag line I just love: biting the hand that feeds IT)

I was also glad to read comment after comment reminding the world that presentations are performances. It takes a certain kind of person to actually enjoy standing in front of a crowd and sharing information — not reciting it from memory, or from notes, or horror of horrors, from a prescripted page.

All this speaks to my current frustration with conferences looking for speakers. They want quality presentations but then they don’t include a way for the judges to hear the speaker or even to get references from people who have heard the speaker. (Hm, maybe speakers should ask for contact information of anyone in the audience who would be willing to say they heard you speak. That sure would be an easy way for people to give you a “tip” for your time.)

No matter how interesting the topic, a poor performer won’t teach much. But a speaker who is really engaged with his or her audience, someone who knows the subject and can make it real, doesn’t need much more than the illustrations on a blackboard, er, powerpoint slide to make the points.

Oh, to get up in the morning

I have a fascination with gadgets and ideas that just might help. Check out my post about practicing yourself out of bed from the other day…

jumpingclock
But how about this! LifeHack.org showed me a new possibility: an alarm clock that moves around the room.. all by itself. Looks like it only moves after you hit snooze. But what if it moved ALL the time? Not being able to even find it to hit snooze would seem to be a real benefit!